Transparency Notice for Adult Social Care Client Level Data Collection

The purpose of the Adult Social Care Client Level Data collection is to enable key aspects of Adult Social Care service provision and integrated health and care pathways across England to be analysed and reported on at a national level.

This collection will also assist Local Government and Integrated Care Boards and their associated systems in fulfilling their Adult Social Care statutory functions by giving them access to more detailed information about demand for and use of their services and outcomes for service users. 

Your personal data, including information about your health, will be collected if you have received Local Authority funded social care services.  

This data will include your:

• NHS number 
• family name 
• first name 
• current postcode 
• date of birth 
• gender 
• ethnicity 

It will also include the kind of support you received (support category), which may reveal information about your health, for example physical or mental health support.

Data is submitted securely to NHS England by Local Authorities in England.

NHS England has issued Data Provision Notices to collect the data under s259(1)(a) and s259(1)(b) of the Health and Social Care Act 2012.

Quality checking 

The data we collect is checked and quality assured by skilled analysts. If necessary, they will check with the organisation who sent us the data to make sure it is correct and complete. 

How we use your data 

We will analyse the data we collect to understand the demand for adult social care services and the outcomes from the services delivered.  

Using data will help us understand how people move between social care and health services so that we can gain better insights into care outcomes, which interventions work best and how local system partners work together. 

We also analyse data for discovery and development purposes to enable understanding of the data items and definitions recorded within systems used by Local Authorities and to support development of future data collections.

Publishing statistics 

We will use the data to publish national statistics and data outputs that contain only anonymous data which cannot be used to identify individuals. We never publish any data that could identify you. 

NHS England treats the data with great care. All data which is shared by NHS England is subject to robust rules relating to privacy, security and confidentiality and only the minimum amount of data necessary to achieve the relevant health or social care purpose will ever be shared. 

Wherever possible, de-personalised data or anonymous data is used and shared to protect patient confidentiality. We also apply the National Data Guardian’s Caldicott Principles to ensure we only provide the minimum amount of data necessary for the purpose for which it is to be used. In some cases, only personally identifiable data can be shared to achieve the purpose, but this is always done in accordance with the law and subject to safeguards to ensure that the data is kept safe and secure. 

All requests by others to have access to data held by the NHS England are assessed on a case-by-case basis by the Data Access Request Service (DARS).   

DARS makes sure that organisations requesting access to data: 

• will only use it for a health and social care purpose
• cannot achieve their aim unless they can use data which could identify you (directly or indirectly) 
• can only access the minimum amount of data needed to achieve the purpose 
• access de-identified data after appropriate techniques have been applied to remove and prevent the disclosure of identifying information 
• have an appropriate legal basis to request the data and have obtained all necessary legal and ethical approvals 
• have appropriate safeguards in place to ensure that the data will be processed safely and securely 

Data which would enable you to be directly or indirectly identified is only shared with: 

• clinicians and the healthcare/social care team providing you with care, such as your local authority, hospital or GP 
• organisations who can provide evidence you have given them your explicit consent to the sharing of your data with them 
• organisations who have been granted specific legal approval from the Health Research Authority’s Confidentiality Advisory Group to use confidential patient information without your consent and who also have ethical approval to do so
• organisations with whom we have a legal obligation to share confidential patient information without consent - for example where there is a Court Order, or where this is necessary for public health purposes under Regulation 3 of COPI

NHS England can share your data with organisations where they have a legal basis to receive it, such as Local Authorities.

Examples include the following:

NHS England will keep adult social care client level data for as long as it is necessary for the purposes outlined above in accordance with the Records Management Code of Practice 2021 and our Records Management Policy. This is currently a minimum of 20 years after death. 

Other organisations that NHS England shares your personal data with must only keep it for as long as is necessary and as set out in their Data Sharing Agreement. Information about this will be provided in their privacy notices on their websites. 

Adult Social Care Client Level data will be stored and processed within the United Kingdom (UK). 

We have been given a legal instruction known as a direction, from the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care under section 254 of the Health and Social Care Act 2012 (the 2012 Act). The direction is called the Collection of Client Level Adult Social Care Data (No 3).

Under the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR), our legal basis is: 

• Article 6(1)(c) - legal obligation in order to comply with the above Direction 
• Article 9(2)(h) - health and social care purposes, supplemented by Data Protection Act 2018 Schedule 1, Part 1, paragraph 2 – the data is being processed for health or social care purposes

Read more about the health and care information collected by NHS England, and your choices and rights. 

• GDPR Register 
• How we look after your health and care information 
• NHS England Transparency Notice 
• How to make a subject access request

Our Data Protection Officer is Jon Moore who can be contacted at: [email protected].

NHS England may make changes to this Transparency Notice. If so, the 'last edited' date on this page will also change.

Any changes to this notice will apply immediately from the date of any change.